“Floating in Lindrethool” was my attempt to write a Twilight Zone episode for the original Rod Serling TV show. Too bad it and Serling are not around anymore, save in the limbo of reruns. For four years, I lived in the town of Binghamton, in upstate New York, where Serling was born and raised. My bathroom window looked out on the cemetery where the Rod was supposedly buried. The town next to Binghamton, Johnson City, was my model for Lindrethool. It existed in the modern world but it was like something out of the forties, always overcast with a lot of abandoned warehouses. Its one remaining industry was the Fairplay Caramel Company, makers of BB Bats. Their smoke stack spewed out a sweet ash like cobwebs of gray cotton candy.

I visualized this story in black and white, and I think that is why a lot of readers have noted its noir tendencies. The brain in the jar is one of those classic science fiction themes—most notably from the films of the fifties and even early sixties. I combined this rich metaphorical goofiness with another icon of the fifties, Death of a Salesman. Slackwell has some Willy Loman in him, but he is much more fashioned after the characters in a documentary about door-to-door Bible salesmen I saw in college. I don’t remember the title, but I think the film was made by a pair of brothers. Add to this a smog-choked world redolent of the Republican economic mindset, and it’s time to float. Sometimes as a writer, those years of crappy jobs and hangovers pay off as research. My friend, writer Richard Bowes (Minions of the Moon), gave me some good suggestions and a pair of eyebrows, or lack there of, that I used in this one.